Firms ‘wasting AI’ by using it to speed up bad habits

SDG Group’s Steve Crosson Smith says companies need to move beyond quick productivity wins and use AI to connect siloed data, expose bottlenecks and give leaders a clearer view of where to act

Businesses are failing to harness the full power of artificial intelligence by using it to speed up old ways of working instead of creating smarter ways to run their operations, experts have warned.

Steve Crosson Smith of SDG Group said many companies were still taking too narrow a view of AI, focusing on isolated productivity gains rather than better decision-making across the business.

Firms across Europe are applying it to fragmented systems, siloed data and old workflows instead of using it to connect information across the organisation and improve the decisions that follow.

Whilst this can help firms generate reports, dashboards and analysis more quickly, it does not give leaders a clearer view of where the real problems lie or what action they should take.

Crosson Smith said the greater opportunity lay in using AI to rethink how businesses function, from the way data is shared and interpreted to how decisions are made and work moves between teams.

In an exclusive interview with The European, he said businesses needed to move beyond a “legacy approach to data” and use AI to create a more joined-up view of their organisation.

This means looking beyond departmental KPIs and using AI to bring together information from different systems, teams and sources, so the wider commercial picture is not lost in separate pockets of data, he said.

Crosson Smith told Juliette Foster: “KPIs are still important, of course, but modern decision-making requires a much more holistic view of the company across all these data silos.

“A lot of companies are certainly applying AI to build personal productivity gains. But they’re not taking a step back and asking whether that personal productivity gain has a positive onwards impact on the overall end-to-end process.”

To tap into the full potential of AI, companies should instead look at the whole process, identify the bottlenecks and barriers holding it back, and use the technology to redesign how that process should work.

“Don’t just try and make individual parts of your processes go quicker. Take a step back and reimagine those processes as if those bottlenecks and barriers didn’t exist, then redesign them and use AI to power that redesign,” he added.

“That is where you really start to get significant benefit out of AI, when you start to reimagine how a process could work.”

Crosson Smith, SDG’s Head of Data Strategy, Governance and Architecture in the UK, linked the problem to the growing volume and complexity of data available to companies, with firms drawing on internal systems and external sources while still having to process, check and prepare that information before it can support proper analysis.

“Data doesn’t come out of these sources and source systems ready for analytics. It needs a degree of processing,” he said. To get real value from AI, companies needed “high-quality, trusted data” that was available quickly through a modern, scalable data platform.

AI could also help firms analyse information that was previously difficult to use at scale, including documents, videos and other unstructured material.

Its real commercial value, he said, lies in moving beyond raw figures into useful interpretation. SDG Group has developed InsightGen, an AI-powered platform designed to turn company data into usable business insight.

Crosson Smith said it could add narrative explanations to dashboards, generate reports automatically and act as “a consultant in conjunction with the human”, allowing non-technical staff to ask questions of company data in plain language.

“People are not looking for metrics, they’re not looking for numbers, they’re looking for insights,” he added. “Why did something happen? And most importantly, what can I do about it to mitigate a negative outcome or create a positive one?”

Looking ahead, Crosson Smith said businesses would increasingly move towards hyperautomation, where AI can make decisions and take action within agreed guardrails, including in areas such as procurement.

The next generation of AI-driven tools was also moving towards self-healing software that can diagnose problems, write and test code, and deploy fixes. He said: “That’s not science fiction anymore and its potential is enormous.”

Watch the full conversation with Steve Crosson Smith on The European’s YouTube channel.

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